Inventor of bar code dies at 91

Revolutionized checkout counter - scanned 5 billion times a day

Published: 12/15/2012 at 1:09 AM

(Los Angeles Times) Scanned more than five million times a day, instantaneously encoding product data while boosting work production, it was with Norman Joseph Woodland’s fingers in the sand that he first invented the revolutionizing bar code.

Mr Woodland, deemed co-inventor of the what was originally a circular emblem of lines that would later become responsible for nearly every product labeling in stores, died on Sunday at the age of 91.

Suffering the effect Alzheimer’s disease and complications of his advanced age in his home in Edgewater, New Jersey, his daughter, Susan Woodland of New York, announced his death on Thursday.

As an undergraduate student at what’s now called Drexel University in Philadelphia, it was after later co-inventor Bernard Silver overheard a grocery-store executive’s pleas to the engineering school’s dean for students for help.